FOUR POEMS

translated from Latvian by Lauris Veips

commentary

here’s a ‘self-aware’ case in point regarding the era: “earlier, ‘twilight’ was a real word, there was no bitterness of the past to it, it was still lovely and coming. on a foggy november evening, you didn’t have to coat yourself in irony, direct speech or unaffected sweetness. ‘a leaden twilight cloaks the vale’ or something to that effect could sound quite true, sincere, deep, and, as it were, a bit strange, so marginally strange that it wouldn’t end up or turn out prosaic. back then twilight was real, now it’s only real when it’s ironic or sweet.

but I want to run and hold hands with a young and beautiful lady, we’re seventeen, enveloped by a heavy fog and the summer night outside the city, the sky – already, and still – a bit light; or, perhaps, at the very climax of a december day, at the gateway of a lofty stone building, to say goodbye with a hopeful kiss; or – forgetting all the girls – to simply stroll through the cemetery and think about death a little, think about it nobly; and to pass through the industrially revolutionized city like a petal carried by the sewer streams: ‘far more monotonous than any woods: the crowd where hollow saplings howl!’ pray for twilight to return, and she will.”

ceramics and the desert

I for one am watering the flowers today. suddenly it’s the police knocking on the wicket gate, they’ve come with the dogs. the jug slips from my hands and cracks against the edge of the flowerbed. when the police leave, I observe the shards at length and think about thermodynamics. I jot it down in my notebook: “… as one body rubs against the other, there arises ceramic sand and a corresponding desert. but the ecosystems proper to this kind of desert are fleeting and unstable. essentially, they can only be surmised.”

camels evolved by learning to load fat up into their hump, keep warm at night and survive protracted starvation

the camel has a hump and it can survive very high temperatures but maintain a body heat of 34 degrees at night. in many ways, the camel is more akin to a cold-blooded reptile than a mammal. the camel can drink a lot, the camel’s poop is dry, fit for immediate use as kindling. the camel sweats but little and burns fat in doing so. the camel is a resourceful animal and also similar to birds of the sky, reaching speeds up to 65 km/h over short distances and maintaining a speed of 40 km/h over long distances. the camel is beautiful.

(untitled)

monsieur G. is writing before falling asleep. no, he is simply sitting down at the table, one leg over the other, his coat and the top button of his shirt undone, his boots untied, he is thinking as he rests his head against his palm: “our excellency has such beautiful eyes, of the green-gray and infinite kind. they are the eyes of a Caesar, they will have delivered me from a mass of things that never concerned me. but dammit is there something sad about them. it’s not stomach flu or heredity, and I doubt it’s women either. like a mirror facing another mirror, he probably sees everything the color of second-grade meat.”